[sift this] At the Company, there is a newsgroup called "thecompany.url.fine." Employees who stumble upon a unique or interesting site on the Web can post to this newsgroup for perusal. It serves as a significant source for Digest material.

Casual surfing of the Web these days is similar to looking for a close friend in a crowd at a football stadium - everyone starts to look alike since there are so damn many people there. For me, word of mouth has turned into the primary way to discover fascinating bits on the Web.

Someone agrees. The Mining Company, a project of General Internet, Inc., has initiated the laborious task of organizing opinions on Web sites into categories. For each category (or site), a guide is assigned to write a weekly feature and also post a series of interesting links relevant to the topic.

The idea is not new, Excite has tried and failed at organizing a horde of editors tasked with cataloging and reviewing the Net. It's a daunting task, given that the Web continues to grow exponentially, but The Mining Company is taking a different tact.

Rather than an in-house editorial staff, The Mining Company is recruiting existing netizens to compose their writing staff. With a small monthly stipend, a small share of advertising profits and an on-line manuals and templates to assist in publishing, The Mining Company's guides are the reason the idea just might work. You see, chances are that they'll suddenly make money for a task they were quite willing to do for free.

While managing an entire off-site staff will probably one of the biggest challenges facing the Mining Company, the value of a site dedicated to ferreting out the useful tidbits of the Net will be its own reward.

[sift this] So, you finally purchased that US Robotics ultra-fast modem and set-up an account with your Internet Service Provider. You double click on Netscape and now you're on the World Wide Web. Congratulations.

Ok, so, what's the big deal?

All the public relations in the world doesn't make it any easier to understand that the World Wide Web is big. Huge. Bordering on the infinite. It takes skill and quality tools to find that tidbit of information that you're looking for. There are two sites on the Web, Yahoo and AltaVista, thateach provide a unique way to find information on the Web.

Anyone who hasn't heard of Yahoo by now is likely in for a significant epiphany. The original index of the Web, Yahoo distinguishes itself from the rest of the Web's indexes first by its unforgettable brand name and by the fact that they add entries to their index by hand.

Most indexes (including AltaVista) on the web are generated via robots or Web spiders that are programmed to jump from link to link in search of new pages. When a new page is found, it's added to the database and the spider moves on. In order to get a site listed in Yahoo, a Webmaster must submit his site to Yahoo and then wait the three weeks or three months it takes for Yahoo's staff to verify the site and include the Web page in the database. With hundreds of thousands of Web pages popping up daily, only the select few end up in Yahoo's database. The end result is a value-added index -- the sites are well categorized, each has a brief description and navigation is a breeze; but it isn't a true representation of the web.

AltaVista is a spin-off of Digital Equipment Corporation, a company famous for its beefy hardware designed to push the limits of technology. DEC created AltaVista in an attempt to index each and every page on the Web. Using a spider called "Scooter", they come pretty close.

I use AltaVista usually when I come up empty after trying Yahoo. Just type a few keywords and AltaVista is likely to find a huge amount of Web pages. For example, I picked the topic "pug dogs" and instantly found 10,000 web pages that matched my term. Therein lies the problem.

Very often, AltaVista finds a tremendous amount of references for a topic, so Web searchers need to be as specific as possible when looking for pages. Also, a quick examination of their help page provides easy tips to drastically improve your searching ability.

The individual strengths of both Yahoo and AltaVista are likely to satisfy most casual surfers.